Electoral Rhetoric in Israel — The Televised Debates A Study in Political Discourse*

Abstract

The televised pre‐election debate, first instituted during the Nixon‐Kennedy campaign in 1960, has since been adopted by virtually all Western Democracies. In Israel, the first televised debate took place in 1977 between M. Begin and S. Peres, who met before the cameras once again four years later. A third such debate took place in 1984, this time between S. Peres and I. Shamir. The increasing presence of the mass media in the political system diverts attention from politicians' deeds to their verbal behavior. The televised debate is a most reliable means of documenting the verbal behavior of political candidates, notwithstanding the constraints imposed on such behavior by the medium and the format. In this paper, the author attempts to analyze the communicative setting of the debate within the Israeli format. Stylistic features of the candidates' discourse are studied, beginning with a review of some salient characteristics of persuasive discourse in general. While identifying and comparing rhetorical strategies of the candidates in three debates, the question is asked whether the differences are personal or perhaps stem from the ideologies of the political movements represented by the contenders. The following stylistic and rhetorical features are described, using statistical and qualitative analysis: figurative expressions and intensifiers, irony and rhetorical questions, repetition and parallelism, meta‐discoursive comments.

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